Status Updates From Where Have You Gone, Michel...

God does not need all the forms of “art” but human beings do: to express praise, thanksgiving, and total bafflement about what it all means.

If some medieval liturgical destruction – Latin, art, music – has been removed from liturgy, the reason given is that the old thing no longer makes sense in the modern world; but in some cases, the old thing is really destroyed because its beauty competes with the centralized individualist’s importance among others…

Use one or two first-class hymnals for the repertory; make sure that the congregation learns simple, “primitive“ chants, hymns, and other music that can stand on its own without accompaniment; on a regular basis, singing at least some music without instrumental support; unplug the microphone…; Keep the repertory stable and “repetitive“.

Why should we put our autonomy aside, why should we “empty ourselves” for this act of worship when the man up front… is not doing that sort of thing?

A Latin mass used to be a form of existentialist tension, in which the worshiper was caught in the paradox of anguish and assurance, the unknowable and the familiar, the enigmatic and the logical – but that is what the spiritual life is all about.

The extraordinary religious act called the mass required extraordinary language.

There is so much to be learned from [the high mass]... I am not referring primarily to the old language or the old music at that liturgy but to the old virtue of humility…

The dreamy, casual “Voice of God“ song, without the addition of phrases like, “the Lord said,“ is a radical break with Jewish and Christian tradition.

During the Latin mass “congregational participation” sometimes reached human beings (and helped them to “do good“) not through their craniums but through another part of human anatomy – their gut instincts.

Latin is largely avoided today in Catholic parishes and chapels not because of progress or the church’s new image of itself or the need for greater participation but because so many of Catholicism‘s influential leaders (clergy and laity) no longer believe in an “awesome” God who has entered into history in an “awesome” way.

A pre-Vatican II church emphasized that the Eucharist, the Mass, was a gift to the human race; the liturgy and art that surrounded it were symbols of gratitude for this unending gift. A postconciliar church, in some places, seems to be emphasizing that human beings are the gift…

Maybe some of them… are longing not for Latin but for the low stress of the old low Mass.

That austere formality of the old Latin rituals sometimes used to encourage much more intense commitment and much more respect than the typical parish’s breezy version of the “new” mass, and the liturgical specialists know this.

Latin rituals invited everyone… to reach for an emotional and spiritual level above the commonplace.

Knowledge (“pure “and as “objective“ as possible) is power. Knowledge of authentic cultural “roots” is helpful for inner strength and self-esteem. Knowledge corrupted as dishonest religious or ethnic propaganda is a form of thumbsucking.

In the best examples of church art (something simple or magnificent) you will always find a disciplined coherence, the impression that the “artist”…has happily submitted to the rules of a “higher authority”…the coherence of a style.

The quasi-military American church was putting excessive emphasis on defending the faith with cold logic, with memorized formulas from a catechism.

There can be no “sticking together” and no distinctiveness without a cultural heritage that defines just how one group is not the same as another. (Customs, traditions, food, art, music, poetry, literature…)