Convert Breaks 6 Year Silence: Tells of Banal Masses by Jamey Brown First let me tell you about the purely beautiful Masses I’ve attended, full of grace and sanctity. I had been spellbound watching Father George Rutler’s TV shows “Christ in the City” and “Stories of Hymns” on EWTN for six years. He was in fact one of the priests who led me to my conversion. He is (until August 1, 2013) the pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in New York City wwwcosaviournyc and I had been planning to go to one of his Masses for years. When I finally did it was breathtaking. When I entered the church it was dimmed, lit only by the light of the votive candles—yes real candles, not little electric whatnots. But not too dark to see the dozen or so icon paintings of saints and the vast painting of our Lord Jesus Christ as big as the world above the tabernacle and baldaquino. A few parishioners knelt in prayer, some women with heads covered. A while later the lights came on and the choir started singing a Gregorian chant, sanctifying the very air. It was jaw dropping. Tears came to my eyes as the Mass began to another Gregorian chant. Eight acolytes entered carrying tall candles followed by Fr. Rutler. As they all bowed before the altar with the incense curling up to Jesus and to heaven I thought of the Scripture from Revelations, “Incense is the prayers of the saints,” and I thought of the Scripture Fr. Rutler had quoted from the Sanctus on one of his “Stories of Hymns” episodes, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts.” As the Mass enfolded before my eyes like heaven on earth, I could not help comparing it to the service I witnessed just seven days before in my own neighborhood in Queens. If you arrived early you were subjected to an organist fingering away at some minor-key Bach fugue that sounded like fast funeral parlor music, conducive to anything except prayer and reflection. Then a blast from the organ rattling the stained glass and any peaceful thoughts any one was harboring, and the Mass begins. It often starts with some rousing march-type song such as “Rain Down” with its chorus sounding like “Bring Back My Bonnie to Me,” or “Sing a New Church” with a chorus much too similar in melody to “Oh My Darlin’ Clementine,” and everyone is ready to march, but I didn’t come here to march. I came here to worship and pray. This is in marked contrast to the soft Gregorian chant evoking holiness and transcendence at the Church of Our Saviour. This celestial music that evokes the background music of heaven itself, this divine music that I couldn’t believe was actually being broadcast on TV, is one of the many graces that melted the hardened heart of this wayward and lost New Ager six years before. This same music that I was so disappointed in not hearing in my local parish, now I had found in a Roman Revival church an hours commute away. Here the Credo and the Our Father are sung to luscious Latin melodies. The local parishes only recite them. The Psalms are also sung to beautiful Latin music whereas at the Queens Mass they are sung to the banal melodies in the Missal that are so mundane that I clench my teeth. Week after week they just remind me of a kid at a toy piano pecking out a three-note “tune” that only his parents could love. The Sanctus is even worse. It sounds—I kid you not-- eerily similar to the minor-key theme of The Addams Family. To me it is unutterably incongruous how this came to be, for there is nothing whatsoever “spooky” about the angels in St. Luke’s Gospel singing about the birth of Christ. Of course musical tastes are purely subjective and I have no trouble with the words to the hymns because they seem to be pure doctrine, but I just ask, “Can’t we do better than this?” There is such a vast wealth of 2000 years of divinely beautiful sacred music, some dating back to the Apostles and the first church Fathers, some written by saints, music that came from souls rejoicing and glorifying God, hymns that martyrs sang as they were facing death, and as they were dying. Can’t we draw on these treasures and not so much on music written in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s that mimicked the pop “Love Makes the World Go ‘Round” and its ilk? It is meant to draw people into the church but I think it drives people out. It makes the church too much like the world. When people go to church they want to go to a holy place, a holy sanctuary that transcends the world, or else why do we gather together at all? Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI said that we should have more Gregorian chant and Latin music in the church. He also wrote in Ecclesia Dei that in some of our Post-Vatican II efforts to reform the Liturgy that “instead of reanimating the Liturgy” we have “devastated” it with “modernity and banality.” But I saw a very good sign yesterday. As I was writing this on July 5th my favorite song in the whole world came on the Mass on EWTN, “Ave Verum Corpus.” It was sung with the original Mode VI melody written by Pope Innocent VI in the 1300’s. The singer’s voice was absolutely angelic (he had annoyed me greatly for months because I thought he was singing in too high a register. Apparently he was made for Gregorian music. I think many others of us are as well). I fell to the floor, sobbing in thanks and praise. (You can hear it on EWTN). It seems EWTN is adding more Gregorian to their Mass. I hope others will too. But in matters of the homilies I am not so optimistic. But I also must admit that I set Fr. Rutler as the rule and that sets a very high standard indeed. I consider him the best living writer I have ever read, and the second best of the living speakers—EWTN’s Foundress Mother Angelica is the first. But again I must grant that I like a certain kind of homily: one that refers to commentaries by Doctors of the Church and theologians and one that tells stories of saints or church faithful who struggle and suffer with problems that we face today. A story I can remember forever--not so much so some abstract phrases, even though they be brilliant. A sermon by Fr. Rutler is liable to have references to Saints Polycarp and Ignatius of Antioch—two disciples of St. John the beloved Apostle, St. John Vianney, St. Augustine, and the moderns Bl. Mother Theresa and Bl. Pope John Paul II, both of whom he knew personally. It also will mention some related events from his vast store of world history and a few tongue-in-cheek jokes. My local priests will not do this. (Perhaps I should say my ex-local priests). While in all honesty, I am sure that they are well intentioned, and you can’t ask a good and noble man to be brilliant if he is not brilliant. But sometimes it stretches the credulity of the listener when in a two week span, I heard three homilies on giving someone else your seat on the bus. Now offering your seat is a fine thing to do because, yes, they are absolutely correct in saying, “we as Christians are expected to do more,” but is this what you went to seminary for? Any seventh grade kid in Catholic school could give as good a sermon. Was there a priestly newsletter that week on keeping homilies simple with simple things the “common man” can relate to? For years I spent half of each Mass just trying to hide the grimace on my face from the music and the homilies. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that every Mass and sacrament was holy no matter how ineptly it was worked. I was accepting that this was what it was and I was still eternally grateful for the glorious Catholic faith that really did work a miracle in my life and delivered me from evil. Every morning I thanked God for the Catholic Church. But I knew I could find a better Mass to approximate the glorious ones I saw on EWTN—the reason I converted in the first place. And I did. And for those of you who are still going to Fr. Bland’s at the parish of the Good Enough, you can give up your seat on the bus and really, really watch your littering this week, and help an old lady across the street—although in New York you are more likely to get a mouthful of smartphone than a “Bless you, sonny.” But I don’t know if it is enough to get you into heaven. But as for me, I found a church where the Mass is full of grace and sanctity and the homilies truly rock my world and rattle my cage and reform my soul and truly change me. I found a church full of smoke and flame. Full of fire, but I had to fire my old church first. For as Fr. Robert Barron on the “Catholicism” Series says, along with so many of his predecessors for twenty centuries have said, “Each and every one of us is called to be a saint.” As Jesus Christ himself said, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Note: Father Rutler has since been transferred to two new churches The Church of Saint Michael where he is the Pastor, and The Church of the Holy Innocents where he is the Administrator. I now attend both). StMichaelNYC and innocents
Posted on: Mon, 30 Dec 2013 21:37:06 +0000
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