by Tim Kirchoff
I found myself dreading Easter this year. Not because I had any particular fondness for my Lenten discipline, but because I knew that liturgical musicians at my home parish would once again start singing my absolute all-time favorite (I’m being sarcastic) song—a cover of Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah, re-written to be about the Passion.1 They can’t sing it during Lent because of Catholicism’s no-Alleluia-in-Lent tradition, but from the Easter Vigil up through Pentecost, it’s likely to be the communion reflection hymn in any given week, and there’s a chance that they’ll play it on any given weekend in ordinary time.
This isn't their only song that annoys me, but it is the only one that has ever made me feel an urge to shout an obscenity in the middle of Mass. In fact, I almost missed Easter Mass last week. I didn't want to go to my home parish because I assumed (correctly, according to my family who attended) that they would sing the song, but wrongly assumed that nearby parishes would still have their usual Sunday evening Masses: I ended up commuting an hour both ways to a 7 PM service, just in order to avoid hearing a few minutes of singing.
I hate this song. It distracts me from prayer as I go up to receive the Eucharist. But it's just as clear that not everyone in the parish shares my distaste for this song: some people evidently love it, and it deepens their experience of prayer as they receive the Blessed Sacrament. The choir certainly likes it, and I’ve noticed that one of the ushers will gently sway to the music and hum along as he guides the communion line.
But knowing that other people are edified by it hasn’t changed the fact that I don’t like the song or the way it’s performed, and each passing year has only intensified my dislike and made it harder to pinpoint exactly what about it I dislike. As the Romans used to say, “de gustibus non est disputandum”—taste is not to be argued over.
Once, back in my undergraduate days, a friend joined me for a daily Mass at my dorm, only to leave shortly before Mass started when she learned that the priest was going to use the offertory table—moved to a position about 5 feet in front of the seats—as the altar. She was disturbed by the idea of foregoing a perfectly good altar in favor of an unconsecrated offertory table.
As for me, I was already accustomed to this priest’s style of liturgy, and I could intuit why he did what he did. He wanted to make the liturgy more intimate, to let us witness the Eucharist up close. Plus, I think he didn’t like the idea of having only two or three congregants sitting 15 feet away from the altar when the whole Mass could take place within only a few square feet. But whatever his intentions, his attempt to make the liturgy more intimate and accessible served to alienate my friend.
There are some who would say that it’s wrong to try to use a secular song in a liturgical context, or that using an offertory table as an altar is liturgical abuse. That was the mindset through which I was originally introduced to thinking about the liturgy (aside from grade school catechism), but I no longer see much point in entertaining those thoughts.
My distaste for certain songs or deviations from liturgical rubrics is not the result of some well-developed philosophy of musical aesthetics or even a sense of liturgical reverence. In liturgy, what uplifts one person may annoy, distract, or even disturb another. Some act by liturgical minister may make it easier for one person to see God at work, but another person might see that same act as the minister trying to draw attention to themselves. Even if their choices make that liturgy distinctly unappealing to me, as long as the person is trying to draw people into actual participation in the Mass, then I don’t have it in me to condemn them. I’ve found myself drawn into liturgy by priests’ ad libs as well as by the prescribed texts of the Mass. Sometimes my prayer is facilitated by what a liturgical minister says or does, sometimes it's despite their actions, but in the end a valid Eucharist is a valid Eucharist.
Conversations about liturgy too often try to universalize subjective aesthetic or theological tastes. It’s one thing to write an essay about either traditionalist or contemporary forms of liturgy in order to make it easier for an audience to understand how to engage that style fruitfully, but it's quite another to dismiss or demean—even implicitly—other legitimate ways of celebrating the Mass.
I’ve seen people on both sides of the liturgy wars accuse the other side’s ministers (be they lay or ordained) of celebrating the liturgy as a way of drawing attention to themselves rather than Christ and the Gospel. But they never recognize how their own preferred style can be similarly exploited by ministers who are more into performance than drawing people into participation, or how the other side's preferred liturgical forms can help lead people to an experience of God's presence that might be harder for those individuals to access in other styles of liturgy.
At this stage in the Church's history, all Catholics celebrate the same Mass, but not in uniform ways. That's not necessarily a bad thing: it means that it's more likely that a person will be able to find a liturgy that they can genuinely participate in, rather than one they must endure for the sake of fulfilling their obligation.
I once found it easy to overlook the use of an offertory table in place of an altar for the sake of making the Mass more intimate, but now I cannot stand musical choices that so many of my fellow parishioners find beautiful and emotionally resonant. Given the choice between wishing for or trying to effect a change in my parish, thus denying these people something that draws them deeper into prayer when I am in no position to provide an alternative, and wishing praying that I could find value in the music, or at least tolerate it a little better, I know which I ought to prefer. If only it were that easy.
1 One of the verses goes as follows: The soldier who had used his sword/ to pierce the body of our Lord/ said 'truly this was Jesus Christ our savior'/ he looked with fear upon his sword/ then turned to face his Christ and Lord/ fell to his knees, crying 'hallelujah!'
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