To Infinity And Beyond: converting to reverent liturgy.

[ 6 Minute Read ]

A conversation the other day with a good friend revealed a shared experience.

We both admitted to experiencing (tolerating?) Masses celebrated by a "Father Broadway". That is, a priest whose liturgical personality - actions, attitude, preparation or lack thereof - obscures the nature of the Mass. We struggled with being forced into the orbit of a priest whose wayward antics were wounding. We continue to pray for those priests in most need of God's mercy.

We learned during our conversation that we both agree that, during the most frustrating moments, the obstacle or factor limiting our attentiveness to the worship of God was ours to own. We acknowledged that our inability to bear what we perceived as an insurmountable distraction required prayer for the graces needed to avoid unfair judgement and various unholy grudges. It is far too easy to find fault with another's behaviour. That said, sometimes one has to call it like he sees it.

Leaving the Church was never an option.

The repeated distraction of a "Broadway" production every Sunday was something beyond our ability to change. Eventually, we each migrated to safer harbours. My friend has recently found a diocesan liturgy celebrated by a reverent priest. Though he is still frustrated by the cheap music and sentimentality that accompanies the celebration of the Novus Ordo Missae, my friend remains in the diocesan fold. His humility is a welcome reminder.

Me? I had reached the conclusion to move on from Novus Ordo Missae (NOM) liturgies some years earlier. I held out for close to twenty-five years, helping out the Latin Mass community on Sundays for a period of three years prior to going on permanent leave from NOM liturgies.

After our university chaplain had moved on, I stayed for a few months to provide support for the incoming chaplain, a "Father Broadway." What had once been a model of reverence and God-oriented worship very quickly became a caricature of the sacred Liturgy. Daily Mass dropped from four days a week to one during the course of a single academic term. Attendance slipped to less than a third of the previous number.

After returning to a sedate Sunday NOM at the cathedral for a year, I had reached a tipping point. My commitment to the NOM as commonly celebrated in my former diocese had become tenuous, and I was ready to shift sideways to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, with which I had a passing association for some years - and had loved it for all its beauty and goodness! - or return to the Latin Mass. I decided to increase my attendance at the local diocesan Latin Mass (usus antiquior) community. Having studied early music, specifically chant and Renaissance and Baroque polyphony at the graduate level, the Latin Mass was a natural fit for me.

I had come to appreciate the spiritual significance of ad orientem worship that I had encountered in the Latin Mass. However, that community gradually adopted an identity defined by an aggressively hostile opposition to the Novus Ordo Missae, to the Second Vatican Council, and to the local bishop who, in fairness to the zealous TLM-ers, seems to have little love for the Latin Mass. Among strangers, its members acknowledge the validity of the NOM and the Council. Among friends, however, they express contempt. Faced with yet another unhealthy dynamic, I withdrew my support and once again drifted back to the 5pm Sunday NOM at the Cathedral.

Sadly, I frequently witnessed among 5pm Mass goers a casual indifference toward the Blessed Sacrament: communicants mishandling the Body of Christ, often taking the host back to their pews before consuming the Precious Body; Ministers of the Chalice drinking the Precious Blood while walking back to the altar. My gentle encouragements to the organizers, to foster reverence for the Precious Body and Blood of Christ, fell on deaf ears.

From Quandary to New Quarters

Shortly after its founding in our area, the Ordinariate community began to attract like-minded individuals, people of faith seeking to worship God in the beauty of holiness.

I had received a few invitations to regularly attend the Ordinariate Liturgy. However, I dragged my feet, complaining that "the language is awkward for me. I'm too set in my ways to learn new prayers. I'm dedicated to the campus Mass." The beauty of Divine Worship, however, was too powerful to resist. The meagre obstacles I had voiced to myself and others faded as I became immersed in the Liturgy.

The Novus Ordo Missae, the Mass of Pope Saint Paul VI can be celebrated in a beautifully reverent manner. This I know, having so witnessed it. That said, as another convert Ordinariate friend has pointed out, a common accompanying disdain for attention to the rubrics that enable the Pauline Mass to be prayed in a dignified manner is so entrenched as to preclude its proper and dignified celebration, at least in our former diocese. I was worn out trying to be an advocate for the NOM, worn out by indifference to real concerns: reverence for the Body and Blood of Christ; reverence for God's word; orthodox music; and so on.

The reason to leave an untenable situation is not merely nor primarily about rejecting the bad. Both my friend and I had made every effort to focus on Jesus in the Mass and to assume personal responsibility for our respective spiritual attitudes, and working out our salvation in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:14-16). The reason for my attending an Ordinariate community is about following the call of God. There is found the true, the good and the beautiful (St Matthew 13:44-46). The hospitality and fellowship waiting to be discovered - and practiced - in an Ordinariate community is a treasure to be shared with the entire Church.

Conclusion

The above is a rapid summary of the experience leading up to a third conversion, a conversion to truth, goodness and beauty.

I was received into the Church in the mid-1980s, in a parish that could be described as progressive-on-steroids. I had no idea I had learned so little about the Faith during a two year RCIA process. Soon after being received, I was blessed to be offered the position of Director of Music at another parish whose priests and people taught me the Faith by their superb example. They helped me become a better Catholic.

Most of the others in my RCIA class soon left parish life after confirmation, the consequence of the cheap religious ideology we had been offered. Instead of the real food of the Catholic Faith through which Christ sustains and transforms lives, we were fed a syncretistic mishmash of neo-paganism, neo-protestantism and Liberation Theology.

The process leading up to a decision to abandon the vague and to embrace the beauty of ad orientem worship was an arduous one. As much as the Ordinariate Mass is commonly celebrated ad orientem, it was I who needed reorientation. Divine Worship habitually orients the worshipper to God in thought and action.

The Ordinariate is both a natural and supernatural experience. Natural, in that there is normal human conflict that requires charity and perseverance. Supernatural, in that there is an abundance of grace to enable the worshipper to be drawn into a holy friendship with the Lord and one's brothers and sisters.