The Sadness of the Liturgy

I didn’t realize until later that it was the first regular Novus Ordo Mass I had attended in over three years. I had sung the Dies Irae in some funeral masses and the propers of some nuptual masses, but the mass on January sixth was the first Novus Ordo I attended unaccompanied by marriage or a corpse. It was not supposed to be a Novus Ordo, it was supposed to be the Traditional Mass, but the bishop nixed our priest’s attempts to offer mass for the proper feast of the Epiphany.

The church still has a beautiful high altar behind its Cranmer table. The atomsphere of the church is made staid and beautiful by stone, though assaulted by LED lights added within the past decade. A great singer was in the loft, and he belted out the chant-propers like an opera singer. It was a “reverent Novus Ordo” by all accounts: Latin ad orientem through the Liturgy of the Eucharist, servers doing the readings, communion on the tongue.

Yet it was off–even more off than your run-of-the-mill Novus Ordo. Accoutrement from the TLM, such as chant and Latin, only stood to make the basic shoddiness and strangeness of the Novus Ordo all the more apparent. The Novus Ordo is nothing but a reflection on the Traditional Liturgy, like one of the monuments built in Vegas of European landmarks. It is all so rational that it ends up not making much sense. For example, the Sanctus in a high TLM is sung by the choir while the priest proceeds with the Canon, while with the Novus Ordo stops while the choir (err, the congregation) sings. That the propers, meant to arise in a communal fashion, was belted out in most individual fashion was fitting, for it is clear that the “man in the pews” has power over worship, and his voice must be heard, however strange it may sound in the context. Good music is always strangely out of place in the Novus Ordo, always a kind of awkward pause or interruption. The singing at a high TLM is in a sense superfluous, since the priest recites all those prayers anyway; yet it is at the same time much more integrated into the worship–it perfects through heightening the mass, not by usurping a role for itself. Snobs can complain about polka masses all they want, but there is really nothing that much worse in interrupting mass for polka versus interrupting mass for Palestrina: Both are simply out of place.

One cannot really understand the desecration inherent in the Novus Ordo without understanding the TLM. The TLM is a perfect work of art; its irrationality forms a wholeness and harmony through its radiance. It is on these terms alone that artists like Shakespeare and Dickens can be understood, along with the architecture of the Gothic, or (as a more appropriate comparison) Sacred Scripture itself. If the TLM is gothic architecture, then the Novus Ordo is a minimall. And so to see it offered in a fine church, or in Notre Dame or St. Peter’s Basilica, is only to highlight its incongruity and defects. To best enjoy the Novus Ordo, it is better to know nothing of the TLM: Nothing of stone, but only of plastic; nothing of chant, but only of crooning.

It was a sad way to end Christmastide–to not really end it, for it was not an Epiphany mass. What had been done to Holy Week is well-documented, but the emasculation of Christmastide is in a way sadder. Pius the Twelfth removed the octave days of St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents. This may seem like a small matter, especially given the larger project of removing octaves from the calendar (only three remained by 1962: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost). But it transformed the second, third, fourth, and fifth days of January into mere feria days (the Vigil of Epiphany, along with the wonderful and fitting Gospel passage of Joseph leading his family back to Nazareth, was also removed). A season rich in prayer and contemplation was stripped down.

The liturgical year, like the liturgy itself, helps turn our attention to the actual reality of what is before us. The liturgy turns our mind to the miracle of the mass, which is transubstantiation. The liturgical year in a similar manner lets us see not beyond but deeper into the seasons of the year. The dreariness of late winter and early spring is appropriate for the Lenten fast, and the recrudescence of April and May is right for Easter. That November is the right month of the dead was driven home to me this year, because instead of the decay of late autumn we were treated to the luminescence of winter around Veterans’ Day. January is proof that Christmas must be celebrated until Candlemas, because no other time of the year is so hopelessly dark and made sterile by the ice. The liturgical year speaks truths to us hidden behind the veils sin has placed between us and reality.

Which is why the movement of a feast like the Epiphany is such a travesty. Epiphany is on January sixth. It is the twelfth day after Christmas. Modern churchmen have decided worship appropriate to the day can be done today (January 8) to make sure honest employers are not defrauded in their employment contracts with devout Christians. What else could be the reason for it?

All modern evils arise from the fact that we are instrumentalists. We do not appreciate the true nature, or logos, or quiddity of things as they are. We care for them not as God’s creations, but as tools for our pleasure and enjoyment, and accordingly we are justified in perverting that creation in whatever manner we choose so long as it facilitates our enjoyment and our pride. So have modernists done with the liturgical year, and so have they done with the liturgy. We must rationalize the calendar to fit with our work lives and the torpor of the phony Christmas season which started mid-November. It can bring a kind of satisfaction to engage in such worship, or to engage in such living, but it is the satisfaction of nostalgia, of refractory enjoyment rather than engagement with the thing itself. It is the vain pursuit of a feeling, when the feeling can only be had in reaction to a real thing. At mass, that thing is right worship in the liturgy; in the rest of life, it is conforming ourselves to the implications of that liturgy. One has a choice to pursue that real thing and therefore to find meaning, or to pervert those real things for our own ends, and to find that without submission to the real, we are nothing at all.