Mass Changes

I am old enough to remember when, as a consequence of Vatican II reforms in the 1960’s, the Catholic Mass transitioned from being said in Latin to being said in vernacular English.  I preferred Latin.  Even as a young boy I felt the elevated and solemn beauty of a language that would remain incorruptibly sequestered on an island time, and I somehow understood—and was enchanted by—the way Latin connected me to an incomprehensibly deep and mysterious history.  Even today, Latin, for me, is indissociable from golden patens and jeweled chalices and incense and light shafting through stain-glass windows and words and music rising up to and resounding in dusky high-vaulted ceilings. 

So, it was with no small interest that I read  that on Sunday, November 27, 2011, at the beginning of the Advent season and the official start of the Roman Catholic Church’s liturgical year, churchgoers participated in a different Mass than they had the previous Sunday.  On that day a new translation of the Roman Missal, the Latin book of prayers upon which the Mass is based, went into effect.  The new translation traditionalizes Catholicism’s most significant ritual by cleaving much more closely to the Latin original.  The often-repeated congregant response, for instance, to the priest’s “The Lord be with you,”—“And also with you”—has been altered to “And with your spirit” because it is both a literal rendition of the Latin “Et cum spiritu tuo” and it acknowledges that the priest is about to perform an action reserved only to those who have received the sacrament of Holy Orders.  In effect, the Church intends the new translation to darn with the formal stitch of its official language a community gathered under God’s authority to hear His word and witness the spirit of Christ channeled through His ordained representative on Earth.

Of even more interest, however, were the reactions of some of those in the pews.  Despite the changes not being an immaculate inception—churchgoers were advised well in advance, and “cheat sheets” containing the altered prayers and responses were available—they were not pleased.  Like the last Incan emperor Atahuallpa, who cast away the Catholic breviary because it would not speak to him as it did the priest, they disowned what they did not understand.  “I am furious with the Church,” one congregant declared.  I am so tired of being told exactly what I have to say, exactly what I have to pray.  The changes are so meaningless.”  Such a view articulates, precisely and with unconscious irony, one motivating reason for the changes: a sense of worship-style entitlement that fits well with an ethic of individuality, but not with the Church’s view of a gathered, worshipping community.

Another, “distraught” by changes that seem “ridiculous” and “stupid” in their trivial concern with “semantics,” refused to “learn the damn prayers.”  Who, he asked, wants “to go to church and be confused.”   A third, also semantically-challenged, wondered about the change in the Nicean Creed from Jesus being described as “one in being with the Father” to “consubstantial with the Father”: “Consubstantial?  What is that word?”  Quite a bit, as it turns out, for its temporal arc reaches back to the Arian Heresy, a 4^th-century controversy in Church history that involved nothing less than the nature of Jesus Christ and the mystery of the Trinity.  Arius, a priest from Alexandrine, Egypt, claimed that the Father and Son were of like being but not like substance: the Son came after the Father and was created by Him.  Such a position contravened the officially endorsed teaching that the Son was of the same substance as the Father and co-existent with Him.  The Council of Nicea in 325 settled the matter in favor of the traditional position: the Father and Son were of like substance, consubstantial.  Arius was declared a heretic. The change to “consubstantiation,” then, purposefully anneals the semantics of here-and-now with the there-and-then, reestablishing a doctrinal matrix of meaning that the more vernacular and less literal “one in being” does not express.

I cannot help but wonder, though, if the stiff-spined resistance to the Mass changes mask a deeper issue for which the aggrieved denunciations are a surface token.  Could it be, I wonder, change itself, that atomizing centrifuge within which we spin with what seems ever-increasing speed, that beleaguering sense of Rocky Horror time-warping discontinuity, that has provoked the outcry?  In the abstract, as a word merely, or as an observed but safely-distanced phenomenon, change presents us with few problems.  It is not hard.  Making it, however, is.

We are creatures of habit, remarkably adept, as Thoreau notes, at “easily and insensibly” falling “into a particular route.”  Routine beckons, the customary solidifies, and revolutions in behavior, as Thomas Paine knew, are tumultuous: “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” raising, as a result, “a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”   The habitual is unrecognized decision making; routine is unacknowledged choice, insensible because it has become so heavily muscled over time that we think it a natural fact, just the way it is, the way things are.  History, context, explanation, contingency all are swept away, and we find ourselves contentedly housed on a cul-de-sac of time.  We cohere, our lives emplotted in a narrative, seamless and durable, whose theme is the who we are.  “Our notions pass for true,” as William James observed.

But change confronts us with the rupturing awareness of time’s hissing passage.  It threatens, reminding us that we are not left handed or right handed, but minute- and second-handed.   Tempus fugit, as Latin has it, and we don’t like the fugiting, don’t like the curled lip of time that mocks us with our smallness, that unsettles all we have settled, and reminds us, with a kick-drum thud, of the inevitable event horizon of our days and ways.  My father-in-law once told me he considered computers stupid contrivances.  “I don’t know how to work one,” he said, “and I don’t want to learn.”  But underneath that curmudeonly bravado, that defiant individuality, lay a fear that he couldn’t learn; that it eclipsed his capability; that “behind the times” was indelibly calligraphied across his forehead; that he was antiquated, obsolescent, time’s relic, carelessly discarded by a culture careening relentlessly forward; that he had been abandoned in a wilderness, beyond the orienting needle of even the most sensitive compass, bereft of rock and refuge and harbor and keep.  What my father-in-law was saying, really, was “I’m afraid.”

“Change,” the poet Wendy Videlock writes, is “the new,/ improved/ word for god.”  And in an oblique sense at least, that is the end for which the Mass changes were designed.  But as Videlock also says, while change is “mighty enough/. . .to shelter” and “ bring together,” it can also “estrange us.”  We experience that estrangement, that unfamiliarity, that unbelongingness, most forcibly from ourselves, with ourselves, to ourselves.