Unstandard Deviation

The Catholic Mass often catches a lot of heat from a lot directions. Some complain about out-of-touch priests, uninteresting homilies, unengaging music, or the rote ritual of the liturgy, to name a few.

My main frustration with Mass is a bit more uncommon. As a Campus Minister, I become somewhat of a de facto liturgist, and whether I like it or not, I'm the point person to plan and execute many liturgies. I would much prefer to simply go to Mass, rather than keep an eye out for the nervous lector who can't remember when to get up for the First Reading, play traffic cop to my altar servers as we set the altar table, or eyeball the EM's to make sure no one runs out of hosts.

I just want to be there, praying with everyone, unaware of the plans and their timely execution, simply celebrating the Word and Sacrament. It's a worthwhile ministry to facilitate liturgy for my community. And I'm incapable of reclaiming my past ignorances about liturgy. So I might as well do as well as I can for as long as I'm doing it.

So when it comes to Sundays at the parish, you won't find me doing much more than sitting in the pews, being a faithful parishioner. Maybe someday I'll get back into EM-ing or lectoring, but I really try to simply be present at Mass, to find what God has for me and grow in communion with Christ and with others.

It's much like my recent trips to friends' weddings with my fiancee; we intentionally and deliberately spend the wedding day in prayer and celebration for the couple. We try hard to minimize the times when we talk about our own future wedding and instead keep our focus on that couple. When I'm at Mass, I just want to be present in prayer and spirit to what's happening in that liturgy rather than fall prey to liturgical criticisms (or even snobbery).

Recently, I've been at a few Masses where my heightened liturgical awareness perks up at the same time as my deep love of good liturgy. The Sunday morning after our friends' wedding, they invited guests to a Mass in a board room at the hotel. The liturgist that dwells deep within me was a bit worried because the "altar" was just one end of a board table, over which a corporal was laid for the Liturgy of the Eucharist. As concerning as it was that the Eucharist wouldn't be celebrated on a table set aside solely for that purpose, the overwhelming beauty of the Mass was undeniable.

Packed into a board room - hilariously marked with a maximum occupancy of 10 - was somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 or 75 people, pressed against the walls and a few people deep in each corner, including a choir corner, filled with a crowd of singers. With everyone a bit worn out from the day before and so many people staying at or near the hotel, it was a logical gathering point to bring together a group of family and friends who were together to uphold a couple starting a new family.

Even though we weren't in a church, before a tabernacle, or around a dedicated altar, the wall of joyful noise in the songs we sang and the enthusiastic attention of everyone at this cozy Mass manifested the truth of what Mass and liturgy are meant to be. For if liturgy really is the work of the people, this was a group of people gathered and invited by a bride and groom putting a liturgical cherry on top of a weekend of prayer and celebration.

Later in summer, the chaplain with whom I work held a reunion for the rising seniors at our high school who had all been on Kairos the previous school year. After an hour or two of informal social time at his parish, we moved to the Church for an evening Mass. Given the enormity of the beautiful parish church, we decided to just bring everyone into the sanctuary around the altar. About 40 of us sat around the tabernacle to hear the Word and homily. Then we circled the altar for the Eucharistic Prayer and reception of Communion, all leading to a big Sign of Peace at the end of Mass.

In this case, we were in a church, around a dedicated altar, in the shadow of a tabernacle. A stricter liturgist than I might have been uncomfortable with such a crowd in the sanctuary for the duration of Mass, especially since none of us, save a couple of readers, were altar serving or doing Mass ministries. However, in the dim twilight of a summer evening, with a family of 40 gathered to pray together, the intimacy of the candle-lit sanctuary and the tightly packed congregation manifested sacramentally what this liturgy meant to do: namely, as our chaplain put it to these teens spending a summer night in a church, "You're here because this is important."

The physical closeness of everyone to one another and to Christ, in the Eucharist and His Church gathered there, reflected the spiritual truth of what we were doing together. So at 9pm on a Thursday summer night, a candle-lit Mass with its worshippers sitting and standing in the sanctuary did the trick.

These two Masses had a gritty, raw, basicness that fit their moments. I talk about these Masses because the ways in which they were unusual were pretty circumstantially justifiable (at least, so it seemed to me) and actually highlighted the core values of the liturgy, even if deviating from some of its norms.

Here's the tough apart though: we still need to embrace the norm. It's powerful to gather a small congregation up around an altar; it's intimate to pack a wedding guest list into a tiny board room. However, these are not the norms of our liturgy: the congregation should be stationed together and facing the ambo and altar in a way that unifies its worship and recognizes the special space of the sanctuary and the altar for the Word and the Sacrament; we need to be in pews with kneelers, so that we can bend down and embrace the humble reverence that is becoming of the truth of our Eucharist.

And as frustrating as these formal rituals can feel at times, it's only in the strength of their stability that these occasional deviations can be so powerful. Encircling the altar is something that works better with a small congregation in an intimate setting, especially in the midst of a particularly specific bond or context, like a retreat. Gathering in a non-church location for a Mass is something appropriate to those who are traveling or gathered from a distance to a particular occasion.

We need to reflect on these "unusual" liturgical experiences that we have and realize those parts of the Mass that speak most strongly to us and why. For me, I love the small moments that carry potent symbolism.

For example, when the priest mixes a bit of holy water into the wine, there's tons of symbolism. On top of all the water imagery in our Tradition, you have the image of blood and water pouring forth for us from the Body of Christ in the Passion of John's Gospel now made present in the liturgy. You have the metaphor present in the prayer that accompanies the ritual - praying that the water (humanity) may go well with the wine (divinity), as Jesus embodied both humanity and divinity in Himself. Oh, and in the early Church, this was a mainly practical thing because wine was thick/chunky and needed to be diluted before being served to a large group - how awesome that we've reinforced it with this beautiful symbolism!

A great priest and liturgist who came to speak at Notre Dame told us a great story. In his deep, intimidating voice that had a bit of both James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman in it, he said, "People sometimes come up to me and say, 'Father, I think Mass is boring.' And I say, 'Mass isn't boring; you're boring!'"

Though I don't want to accuse anyone of such a crime, I will remind everyone that Mass only gives us what we put into it. Or more accurately, we only become aware of the fruits of the Sacraments and God's grace when we're living a prayerful, faithful, reflective life. So when you next go to Mass, don't be boring!