Liturgy as Poetry

Recently my family and I again started attending attending the Traditional Latin Mass on Sundays. We're not newbies, exactly. We were registered parishioners at Mater Dei, the FSSP-run parish in Dallas, during my years of study at the University of Dallas. But as a family we've been away from the Latin Mass for years, finding a home at a liturgically conservative suburban parish during our time in Raleigh, and trying to find a home during our first year back in Wisconsin at the little country parish where, a little more than a decade ago, Rosemary and I were married.

Just today, as we assisted at a beautiful Missa Cantata for the Feast of the Epiphany, I was thinking about a conversation I had had with a parishioner at that little country parish. He was curious, of course, as to why we'd jump ship to drive twice as far to attend Mass somewhere else. A number of folks at the parish are probably disappointed to have lost another young family. Folks there are fighting the good fight against dwindling numbers, and at most services the pews are no more than a third full. Dairy is failing, and farmers are closing up shop. Young people are going off to college and then settling down to life in the nearby towns. A significant percentage of young people stop going to church after being confirmed. A disturbing number of their parents, in fact, don't even attend Mass, even if they insisted on bringing their children to CCD.

Back to that conversation. "It's banal," I explained about my perception of the Novus Ordo liturgy.

Initially I startled even myself with the bluntness of this comment, and I tried to walk it back. I am far from disparaging the parishioners who've poured themselves into that parish, or the pastor, who loves his priesthood and serves the people faithfully. And of course, Jesus is made fully present, body, blood, soul, and divinity, in both forms of the Mass. In fact, these are points I make when I teach an online sacraments class to high schoolers for a program that attracts students whose families attend both forms of the Roman Rite. When we cover the unit on the Mass, we study both forms, and my diplomatic modus operandi has always been, and rightly so, to point out what is essential to the Mass--the consecration, the prayer of thanksgiving, the consumption of the sacred species by the priest--and how these elements are present in each.

But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that banal--that is, lacking in originality or freshness, obvious, commonplace, hackneyed--although undiplomatic, is an accurate way to describe the perhaps rightly named ordinary form of the Holy Mass.

Another thread of my rumination is a conversation that I recently had with students in another class--a literature class. We had just finished reading Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," his magnificent first-person narrative of a sinner's flight from God "down the nights and down the days," "down the arches of the years," "down the labyrinthine ways," and "in the midst of tears."

We had just spent half an hour dissecting the admonition from the end of the poem, where the speaker has shifted to God, the "hound of heaven" who had pursued that sinner with "deliberate speed" and "majestic instancy": "Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me." Drave is an archaic past tense form of drive, or propel, so basically God is saying that, since God is love, the one who pushes God out of his life also pushes love out of his life.

Although my students aren't exactly complainers, it came out, as we worked through Thompson's archaisms, that there was a general frustration at the way the odd language obscured the meaning of the poem. Why does he say Thou dravest when he could simply have said, You drove? Why, for that matter, speak of bruits, or robes purpureal, or sun-starts, or azured daises? In a poetry class this is tantamount to a rebellion, for difficulty is one of the things that makes poetry poetry, rather than prose. My inclusion of the word basically up above when I described the meaning of the final line of Thompson's poem was intentional because, well, in the context of the experience of the poem, the line means far, far more.

In a sense my students understood that, at least partially. As is my wont, we had begun class with a reading of the poem, with students having to rely solely on what they could take in by careful listening. Only later would I hand out the printed copies. Comprehension, unsurprisingly, was not great. But almost universally, students spoke enthusiastically about the way the poem "flowed," about the overlaying of words upon words, and of a frantic flight and of the chase that they had dimly been able to perceive. There was a general feeling of immense drama in the flight and the chase. Some students caught more of the specifics, some caught far less; everybody, however, wanted to figure out what was going on in what they had just heard.

Why? Why did they want to know more? It was because they had a sense that their first listen had only permitted them to scratch the surface of the poem's great reservoir of meaning. There was more hidden below the surface, much, much more that was available only to those who made the effort to look up the archaic words, analyze the subtle changes in the refrains, dissect the metaphorical language, etc., etc.

Which brings me to yet another thread in my rumination. A priest-friend recently posted about his reading during a spiritual retreat. He had juxtaposed a comment from the liturgical reformers following the Second Vatican Council--that there was a desire to simplify the liturgy, and to make it more comprehensible to ordinary folks--with a statement from the Council of Trent--that there is nothing superfluous to the Holy Mass in the Roman Rite, that is, the form now called the extraordinary form.

When I teach the high school sacraments course, we look at the confiteor side-by-side as this prayer is recited in the ordinary and extraordinary forms. It's a great example of the attempt at simplification in the ordinary form. Not only are the mentions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Michael the Archangel, and Saints Peter and Paul removed in the new, revised version, it's also said only once. In the older form, on the other hand, first the priest recites the confiteor, and then the servers, who add ad te, Pater, as they speak their confiteor also to the priest.

Within this single prayer, therefore, it is clear that there are many things that have been stripped away. And of course, it's just a single prayer. Looking at the two forms of the Holy Mass side-by-side shows clearly that the Novus Ordo is dramatically stripped down, simplified, ... shorn of so many subtleties of language, of gesture, and of visual imagery.

In other words, to bring these threads of my ruminations together, it's like a poem turned into prose. Yes, yes: that's what the poem means. Yes, yes, Jesus Christ is made fully present in both forms. But anybody who has listened to a poem and been enchanted by the mystery of its flow of language, its rhythm, and the way it builds to a crescendo, knows there's so much more.

The prose explanation is all so ordinary, so humdrum, so lacking in originality and freshness.  ...So banal.

So, too, the ordinary form of the Mass.

I'm led to suspect that this is what the Council of Trent was getting at with its insistence that there is nothing superfluous to the Roman Rite. I also suspect that this is why so many young folks these days say they're bored with Mass at their Novus Ordo parihes and stop coming as soon as they're no longer forced to come. I also suspect that this is why so many of the other young folks who continue to go to church look for the most reverent liturgy they can find, in whatever form is readily available to them.

To borrow a line from Joshua, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. ...Mainly at the Traditional Latin Mass, that is. I pray that my own boys will work their way through any initial frustration with the extraordinary form just as my literature students work their way through great poems. It's all in Latin, it's too long, it's too complicated, it's archaic and outdated. No, not at all. Just as it is with good poetry, there's meaning at every level of understanding of the Holy Mass that will keep it always fresh, always new to the believer, captivating ordinary folks and great theologians alike. There's nothing superfluous to it at all.