Stop trying to make liturgy beautiful

Let the Mass be the Mass

This thought occurred to me suddenly the other day, and I can’t seem to shake it. Trying to make the liturgy of the Mass more beautiful is like putting on makeup. A little bit, carefully applied, brings out the natural beauty that is already there. But apply too much, and it starts to look like a clown show.

Of course, I’m no expert on wearing makeup. In fact, everything I know about it comes from an episode of Full House I saw when I was a kid. So I have no idea if the metaphor works exactly, but I think the premise is sound. The liturgy does not need us to make it beautiful. It is already beautiful. What we need to do is get out of the way.

Arguably the greatest Catholic liturgical theologian of the twentieth century was Fr. Romano Guardini. In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, he said this:

When the liturgy is rightly regarded, it cannot be said to have a purpose, because it does not exist for the sake of humanity, but for the sake of God. In the liturgy, man is no longer concerned with himself; his gaze is directed towards God.

In other words, the liturgy of the Mass is not a tool we use to get us to something else. It’s not a transitional object of some sort. The Mass is an end in itself. It is a direct encounter with God, and we do not use God as a means of getting to something else. Once we get to God, we have arrived at our destination.

Though Guardini was not addressing beauty directly, this does explain why the Mass is beautiful. It isn’t because we have the right number of candles on the altar, the perfect vestments, or the best music. The Mass is beautiful because the Mass is Christ, and Christ is inherently beautiful. He does not need gussying up in order to be seen that way.

Dostoevsky famously said, “Beauty will save the world,” and this has been seized on by Catholics throughout the last century. Dorothy Day used to repeat it regularly, for example. It is easy to see the appeal. We live in a time of ugliness. Whether it’s the horrors of war or poverty, or simply the banality of living in a culture in which most things are mass produced, we are diminished by the experience of living in a time so bereft of beauty.

We are so far from beauty in the modern world, in fact, that we have ceased even to understand what it is. Beauty is not merely a subjective preference. Rather, as St. Thomas Aquinas points out, beauty is a transcendental reality, like goodness or truth. We do not decide that something is beautiful, but rather we discover it. And something can rightly be called beautiful only when it reveals clearly the purpose for which it exists. For most things, this means pointing to something beyond itself. A beautiful pen, for instance, would be one that not only writes well but that clearly points in its shape and appearance to writing as its end. Human beings, made in the image and likeness of God, point to God as their end and can rightly be called beautiful for this reason. The beautiful person reveals the beauty of God. The liturgy acts similarly. Unlike creatures, God is beautiful not because He points beyond Himself but because He points to Himself, since all things that exist find their true purpose in Him. Therefore, the more beautiful the liturgy is, the more it points to God.

The regnant philosophy for many years, at least in North America, was to homogenize and domesticate the liturgy. Vatican II called for reforming the liturgy and removing “useless repetition,” but what happened in many places went far beyond that. Altars were stripped bare, churches were constructed to be “functional” rather than beautiful, and an attempt to simplify the liturgy to make it more accessible went into hyper-drive. Chant was banished, vestments became plain, altar rails were dismantled, and an effort to emphasize an essential equality between priest and people took center stage. The thought was that if you eliminate these things, the Mass will become less ritualistic and more natural, allowing for easier access to God by the faithful. 

But nature abhors a vacuum. The Mass cannot become less ritualistic, because it is inherently a ritual. If we try to take away its historical ritualized elements, new ones will inevitably emerge to take their place. That is exactly what has happened in the way the Mass is celebrated in many places today. Priests give long-winded, joke-laden intros at the beginning of Mass. Lay participants in the Mass engage in strange gestures and movements, for instance the bizarre choreography that has developed around the singing of the psalm in many parishes. The passing of the peace has taken on an epic significance. The faithful link hands and lift their arms in a gesture that mirrors the priest during the praying of the Lord’s Prayer. All of this is just as ritualized and repetitive as what it was meant to replace, but without any real meaning behind it. The rituals of the Mass developed naturally, evolving over centuries, and so they carry within them an inherent meaning that has been honed over time. They are beautiful because they free us from slavery to our own agendas and point us instead away from ourselves and towards God. The new rituals do not benefit from this history. Most of them are unplanned developments that have sprung up and become quickly accepted as normative, without any thought towards why. For this reason, they often obscure the beauty of the Mass, because they do not seem natural. They are rigid and forced, and they generally emphasize the people making them, be they priest or laity, far more than they point to God.

This is certainly a problem, but the answer offered by well-meaning Catholics who want to see the beauty of the Mass restored is often equally problematic. In an effort to make the Mass beautiful, parishes that are sometimes informally referred to as “traddy” will throw in just about anything they can think of that sounds traditional. There is no lace frilly enough, no candle high enough, no vestment ostentatious enough. Birettas for everyone, and a paten under every bowl. If a ritual can be said to have existed prior to Vatican II, no matter how out of place it may seem in the modern world, it must be reclaimed and restored. The result of this kind of “traditionalism” is not a more beautiful celebration of the Mass, but a celebration that seems gaudy, self-important, and equally bereft of beauty as the worst of felt-banner-clad guitar Masses.

The desire to see the beauty of the Mass restored is a good desire, but it is often mis-channeled. The purpose of the reform of the liturgy after Vatican II was not to deny the place of ritual in the Mass, but to scrape off some of the thick, clown-like makeup that had been obscuring the natural beauty, truth, and goodness of the Mass. Not everything that had developed over time was good, just because it was old. Some things were getting in the way and needed to be trimmed. That trimming was meant to be careful, almost surgical, the way you would prune a healthy tree to allow it to grow better. Instead, in many places, people went nuts with the weed wacker. But the answer is not simply to paste every single cut branch back on.

The way to restore beauty to the Mass is to celebrate it with faithfulness and integrity from the missal as we have received it. Priests and liturgists should carefully read and re-read Sacrosanctum concilium. The Council’s words should be relied on to shed light on all the choices we make about how to celebrate the Mass. In many cases, because the Mass has become so “de-ritualized” in the last fifty years, this will mean restoring older traditions, such as the use of chant, incense, and high quality vestments that match the importance of the occasion, all of which is perfectly in line with the reforms of Vatican II. But every choice should be scrutinized and weighed. Will it emphasize the beauty already present in the liturgy or obscure it? Does it draw our attention to God or to ourselves?

The most important adjustment that can be made by the priest is, as the old saying goes, just to say the black and do the red. In other words, let the missal do the heavy lifting. Do not try to make it better, Father. It is not about you. Everything you need is already there. Your main job is to get out of the way.

For lay people, though, the adjustment will be harder. We are unaccustomed to beauty in our world today, and so as flawed as the ritualized elements that have emerged over the last fifty years are, they have filled a void for many people, often without them realizing it. For those today who grew up in the Church and have continued to go to Mass into adulthood, things like a ten minute passing of the peace or songs that emote more than they glorify are the tradition, and anything that challenges these things is therefore a threat. Changing them should be done carefully and slowly, so that everyone has time to adjust. One important aspect of this, emphasized by Sacrosanctum concilium, is education. Clergy have a responsibility to teach about the Mass, but the laity also have a responsibility to seek understanding. While many Catholics have continued to be nourished by the Mass over the last half century in spite of so many accretions, many more Catholics have checked out entirely. De-ritualizing and de-mystifying the Mass has resulted in lots and lots of Catholics who do not go to Mass because they do not see the point.

Yes, beauty will save the world, because true beauty is only found in God, and the Mass is where God is to be found. The world is hungry for beauty, and the Mass is the answer to that hunger. The sooner we stop fretting about how to make that obvious, the sooner we can start to feed the starving.

Picture taken by JoeJ10 and used under Creative Commons license.