Right Now is the Time to Fix the Liturgy

I’ve been hesitant to get too involved in the “Liturgy wars” in the Church, for three major reasons: it’s a highly charged debate; some of the hotly-debate questions are objectively true or false, some are just matters of taste, and people aren’t always great about acknowledging which are which; and finally, there’s relatively little that most of us can do. But I know that some of you are in positions in which you can do something, so this post is written for you. And I want to make it clear that right now is a once-in-a-lifetime moment in which meaningful improvements to the Liturgy are possible. Why? Let’s consider the confluence of several events:

1. In August, a Pew Research poll found that only one-third of Catholics believed in transubstantiation. Even this only expresses part of the problem, because it wasn’t that they rejected Church teaching… only a third of respondents (of all religions) even realized that the Church even taught transubstantiation in the first place. So there’s a crisis of faith that’s pretty clearly connected to a crisis of Eucharistic catechesis.
2. We’re in the rebuilding phase. For weeks or even months, we didn’t have public access to the Mass, and now we’re slowly relaxing all of those regulations. But certain restrictions remain in place, including that most places are still not allowing any congregational singing. So if you wanted to make a change, you couldn’t find a more convenient time to do it.
3. Yesterday, GIA Publications announced credible accusations of “sexually predatory behavior” by David Haas. Haas, for those who don’t know, is one of the two or three most important composers of Catholic contemporary music. Chances are, you know songs of his, like “Blest Are They,” “You Are Mine,” or “We Are Called.”
4. Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi for much of the Church. The history of the feast is fascinating, connected to a Eucharistic miracle in Bolsena, Italy, in 1263. A priest who had started to doubt transubstantiation was celebrating the Mass, and at the moment of consecration, the Eucharist miraculously began to bleed. Later scientific examination would reveal the host to have transformed into cardiac tissue.

And so, we find ourselves in a moment in which we have the space to reconsider how we’re approaching the Liturgy, as well as several good reasons to reconsider those things immediately. So when I say that the Liturgy needs “fixing,” what does that mean?

The Problem: We Keep Putting the Horizontal Over the Vertical

Broadly speaking, our worship expresses one of two dimensions: a vertical dimension (our relationship with God) and a horizontal dimension (our relationship with our neighbor). We can see these two dimension in Mass, but we can see them in other ways as well. When we pray the “Our Father,” we’re saying something vertically about the Father, and something horizontal about the “us” making up that “our.” Both of these dimensions are important, but (a) they’re not equally important, and (b) they’re related to one another in an important way. Jesus expresses this well in the conversation he has with the lawyer in Matthew 22:34-39,

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they came together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”

Jesus is showing us not only that there’s a vertical and a horizontal dimension to the Christian life, but also the proper order and relationship. Our love of neighbor is rooted in Christian charity, overflowing from our love for God, and God’s love in us. And so you can’t grow in your relationship with God and reject your neighbor: “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). But make no mistake, the vertical dimension of the love of God is still the “great and first commandment.” If you get this wrong, you end up without right relationship with God, or right relationship with your neighbor.

In the mid-twentieth century, there was a sense in which we had obscured the horizontal relationship, that people saw holiness as simply a private thing, and didn’t concern themselves about evangelization or have a deep sense of the Church as community. However true that may or may not have been, the solution in many places was certainly to overcorrect the perceived problem, to focus on the horizontal dimension to the virtual exclusion of the vertical. This is reflected most dramatically in the way we speak and sing about the Eucharist: are we talking about the Holy Sacrifice of Calvary, or as a sort of community meal?

Sacred Music is the Most Important Overlooked Part of the Mass

The reference to “the way we speak and sing” is intentional. I know priests who spend hours preparing their Sunday homilies, but then treat the music as an afterthought, or leave it entirely up to the music director or someone else. I think that’s an enormous mistake, and I’d even suggest that it more than offsets the value of their homilies. And I think I have St. Basil the Great (300-379) in my corner on this one. In a homily that he preached on the Psalms, he gives a great insight both into the role of the Psalms, and of sacred music more broadly. He begins by asking, “What did the Holy Spirit do when he saw that the human race was not led easily to virtue, and that due to our penchant for pleasure we gave little heed to an upright life?” He inspired an entire book of the Bible that’s entirely dedicated to sacred music, the Psalms. When we approach the Psalms today, we encounter them (a) in translation, and (b) often read, rather than sung, but it’s worth remembering that this was sort of the songbook of Israel.

In this way, Basil notes, the Holy Spirit “mixed sweetness of melody with doctrine so that inadvertently we would absorb the benefit of the words through gentleness and ease of hearing, just as clever physicians frequently smear the cup with honey when giving the fastidious some rather bitter medicine to drink.” Basil points to two groups in particular, children and spiritually immature adults, who will ignore or reject the homily, but will go home humming the music, writing that “not one of these many indifferent people ever leaves church easily retaining in memory some maxim of either the Apostles or the Prophets, but they do sing the texts of the Psalms at home and circulate them in the marketplace.”

That’s why it’s such a big deal that in many places, the pastors actually have very little influence in what the music is like: the music is the homily that the lukewarm are most likely to remember. When you’re talking to fallen-away Catholics, see how many of them can name all Ten Commandments, or remember anything in particular that their priest actually taught them. Then see how many remember the refrain to “On Eagles’ Wings,” and you’ll see what Basil meant.

The Horizontal Music that Needs Replacing

Contemporary hymnody gets criticized from two perspectives: how it sounds, and what it’s saying. The particulars of the first (involving instrumentation, melody, and the like) are both nuanced and largely beyond the scope of my own competence, so I’ll stay silent on that part, except to say that if we truly believe that God is True, Good, and Beautiful, we need to stop pretending that liturgical beauty is optional. Instead, I’ll focus more on the second part: what are we saying?

Even here, I’m not going to give any sort of exhaustive examination. Instead, I just want to propose a basic rule: if it’s a hymn in which we’re praying to ourselves, it probably doesn’t belong in Mass. What do I mean by that? Traditional hymnody almost universally takes one of two forms: us directly praying and praising God, or us speaking of the wonders of God. Of course, there are a handful of exceptions, in which we’re (for instance) quoting things that God has said to us in Scripture. But if we’re going to include this in the Liturgy, we need to be thinking: why? what are we trying to express by this, and are we intending to turn our voice away from God and towards ourselves? But much of the controversial contemporary music turns our eyes away from God and towards us. There are two giveaways: if we’re singing about how great we are, or if we’re singing songs pretending to be God and singing to us. In other words, is the “you” in the lyrics God or us? And is the “I” us or God?

Since I mentioned David Haas earlier, consider what’s perhaps his most famous hymn, “We are Called.” If you read the lyrics, the entire song is us encouraging ourselves. Is that a bad message? No, of course not. But is it appropriate for placement in Mass? Or what about “Gather Us In,” by Haas’ regular collaborator, Marty Haugen?

Here in this place new light is streaming
Now is the darkness vanished away
See in this space our fears and our dreamings
Brought here to you in the light of this day
Gather us in, the lost and forsaken
Gather us in, the blind and the lame
Call to us now and we shall awaken
We shall arise at the sound of our name

We are the young, our lives are a mystery
We are the old who yearn for your face
We have been sung throughout all of history
Called to be light to the whole human race
Gather us in, the rich and the haughty
Gather us in, the proud and the strong
Give us a heart so meek and so lowly
Give us the courage to enter the song

Here, the hymn is apparently (?) to God, although I’m mostly just deducing that from context. But what are we saying? We’re apparently telling God that we have been “sung throughout all of history,” and then have the audacity to call other people “rich and haughty.” I’m reminded of nothing more than the Pharisee’s prayer in Luke 18:11-12, in which he prays, “God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.” And what does Jesus say about this? That the man “stood and prayed thus with himself.” That is, this type of praying pretends it’s the worship of God, but it’s really self-worship, a sort of praying to ourselves. We can do without this. Indeed, if we want to help people get that the Mass is about the Eucharist, and not just community gathering or self-aggrandizement, we need to do better.

So please, if you’re a reader in a position to heal the Liturgy, this is the time to act boldly. Don’t wait until everything is back to normal, and we’re back to complacency. We’re in the midst of accepting all sorts of other changes, how about a handful of changes that are focused on purifying our worship of God?