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Wrote about attending mass a while back, answering q. by a friend, young fellow in his 80s, suggesting how to find spiritual results at mass, nothing grand, mind you, but what picks you up and, and what the heck, perks you up in terms of doing the right thing.

New mass does its best to distract you, you know, when you’d like to pray. Just a little, you know . . .

James Baresel, in Rorate Caeli, quotes experts on the subject, among them Cardinal Newman, who in his 1848 novel Loss and Gain, describes Catholics at mass,

Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation;—not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God’s priest.”

Another, Monsignor Ronald Knox, in his 1948 book The Mass in Slow Motion explained that “if you find it difficult or . . . dull trying to follow the Mass, you are much better employed in simply kneeling there and saying your prayers, with a book or without a book, while Mass is going on” and that “[t]he Church doesn’t oblige you to follow [the texts of Mass]; she only obliges you . . . to be there.”

A third writer, Father Bryan Houghton, in his 1958 novel Judith’s Marriage” set just before Vatican II, the main character found the mass nothing like what she thought “a religious ceremony ought to be” since it “was not in any sense a community service; everybody seemed to be doing exactly as he liked”:

The priest was “fiddling about with his tools in complete silence.” A father of a family was focused on pictures in the devotional book Garden of the Soul. His wife was saying the rosary. “Nobody was paying the slightest attention to the priest, just as the priest was not paying the slightest attention to the congregation.” Judith realized that what each person was doing in his own way was adoring God.

Pope Pius XII had made the point in his 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei, “that it is impossible for all to be moved and attracted to the same extent by community prayers, hymns and liturgical services” and that Catholics “can adopt some other method which proves easier . . . they can lovingly meditate on the mysteries of Jesus Christ or perform other exercises of piety or recite prayers which, though they differ from the sacred rites, are still essentially in harmony with them.”

Pius XII was convinced that each person as an individual has his own individual talents and characters and it would seem “to accept that all will introduce at least some individualistic nuance into how they pray.”

Indeed, a person’s prayer is an intimate matter, not to be subsided in favor of what’s common. After all, the word itself, common has also the meaning lesser, as in the admittedly snobbish judgment, he or she is so common, less worthy of notice.

In any case, prayer is something special and not to be limited to what’s done as a group, which is also important, of course, but often subsidiary.

Baresel:

It would seem just as obvious that Catholics would realize and develop an increasing variety of ways to pray at Mass over the course of millennia.

No great intelligence should be needed to realize that the most important thing is for people to spiritually unite themselves as closely as possible to God and to the sacrifice being offered.

Emphasis on spiritually.

We don’t hear that kind of talk these days, immersed as we are or our leaders expect us to be in a “collectivist piety” tradition, “prioritizing  . . .  praying as part of a group over praying as well as possible.”

Yes.

We would rather hear the claim that “all will pray best at Mass if they do so as part of a self-conscious collective.”

Yes.

Baresel continued:

Rather than accept that they themselves pray better collectively because of their individual character, talents and temperaments, [the powers that be] put forward their own preferences as innate to human nature.

Not good, my friend, nor fitting in the circumstances.

Further:

Evidence that some pray better individualistically [are] dismissed with exemplary circular logic: an insistence that such people are ‘not open enough’ to praying collectively.

A pity.

Historically, Baresel concludes,

Catholics [have] had little interest in . . . fostering a collective spirit because they understood that the only essential “social” aspect of the Mass was a person’s membership in a social institution—the Church.

Contemporary preoccupation with creating a collective spirit is not the return to Patristic or Medieval piety that its advocates claim. It is a result of the influence of modern Continental philosophy—which elevates emotion above intellect and is therefore preoccupied with an unnecessary “feeling of community.”

How infrequently do we hear such opinion.

7-1-23: Preacher in thespian mode. Good, if overdone. Hard to do well.

7-2-23: Fellow worshiper chats people up after mass. Proof of when church after mass is not a church but a social hall.

7-3-23: Preacher offers paralysis by analysis. How dry is he.

8-1-23: Chat sermon: “Have you noticed that . . . ” Twice. “I don’t see how . . . but . . . ” His version of “Right? . . . Right? . . . ” A sort of “Between you and me” approach. Over the back fence.

9-10-23: Sunday mass, two sisters chat throughout, mother ignores it. Preacher goes 12 minutes, delivering the good news. Girls continue, but at Sanctus they quiet down. Demonstrates power of liturgical sign, in this case bells, when all kneel and quiet descends. (Except when priest speaks out, time and again, sometimes loudly, mistakenly thinking he’s the legitimate focus!)

9-28-23: The day the book fell. Spilled out when I the reader, walking away after reading the pre-gospel passage, left it on the missal. On to the floor it went, scattering the many small sheets bearing names of the dead to be announced and prayed for! No dull moments when Jim’s the reader!

Bright spot: Fr. R. from Venezuela, celebrant at the altar, drops to hands and knees to help me gather them up! From that moment, he’s my favorite priest at the parish. (My next time as reader, the whole book had been cleaned and neatened up.)

10-5-23: On this day, I the reader and bells-ringer managed the reading and petitioning but let mind wander and missed my bells at Sanctus. But ever onward and upward, bit by bit to my ultimate goal — change it all to LATIN!!

— JUST KIDDING!!

Same day, to La Colombe, where at counter forgot name of my fave coffee, which usually was posted but on this day was nefariously missing. And young lady at counter refused to read my mind! I hate it when people do that!

As for what I was reading over coffee that day, later, OK?

(POSTED: 8/22/11) Preacher man, preacher man, sing me a message: I reached the age of reason in the ’30s, voting and drinking age in the ’50s, ineligibility for the draft in the ’60s (military, not athletic-scholarship draft, for which I never quite qualified). Many other ages since then, too numerous to mention, but now I’m at the age when sermons almost never satisfy me.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, being older than almost all the preachers I hear, I’m allowed to complain. Sermons are too long, too personal, disorganized, lacking beginning, middle and end (you never know when one will stop, though eventually they all do), insufficiently conducive to the worship experience, etc. (I unloaded all my cares and woe about it in a Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest column a few years back.)

More good news: there are happy exceptions. The Jesuit Fr. Chris D. a few months back got from me these words of commendation:

As to my liking yr sermon a week ago, it was because it was on faith, which gets not enough attention, as if true believers are the only ones who go to church, it had one idea, you gotta have trust (which doesn’t solve the problem, of course, but no sermon can do that, just give a nudge), it had a beginning, middle and end, it was short and sweet.

I admit I almost bailed out attention-wise at the start, which sounded like an old-time philosophy thesis, and admit you didn’t keep me entirely from wandering, but yr whole demeanor and honest, earnest presentation kept me enough on board to catch the ending. I might have cheered when you called a halt before I was wondering when the end would come.

That last is crucial. So: length, signs of organization, basic stuff here. Ordination gives a license to preach, but it doesn’t make a man a preacher. Nor would it a woman, nor a married man, by the way, which makes this a problem that’s impervious to your favorite revolutionary change in direction of who gets ordained or not.

Another sermon I recall, though not in detail, was by Deacon Tom D. a while back, which was remarkably well prepared, and I’m not sure but I think was read by him. Yes. Reading a well-written sermon is the way to go for many. Deacon Bruce B. years ago also delivered sermons that showed careful preparation, almost certainly written out beforehand. Are deacons more careful about it, familiarity not having bred contempt for the process?

A Southwest Side priest, Fr. George P. at Queen of Martyrs in Evergreen Park, goes beyond that, providing his sermon in writing before he delivers it. Now that’s what I call accountability.

My model for such preparation is one of our separated brethren, the Rev. Bob L., of Oak Park, whose sermons were available for several weeks, easily taken off the vestibule rack at his small Lutheran church. Bob was a neighbor. He and his wife raised five very presentable kids, by the way. And the sermons? They were meaty and provided much food for thought. Now that’s what I call preaching.

Well, we might pay attention to the God idea, which is what believers say. Not here to argue the point, rather to use it for starter.

Take confession, still a going term, once presented as replacement by the 1969 fellows as reconciliation, typical softening by the ‘69-ers as off-putting, something you can use in mixed company.

Find a confessor, the listener, who will be neither shocked nor bored, who pays attention to what you say and with any luck comes up with something that shows he gets you or at least does so this time. News you can use, you might say . . .

Then there’s praying, in which passivity is sometimes overrated. Referring here to the practice of sitting or kneeling in church, Blessed Sacrament exposed or not, waiting for the Spirit to move you. Overrated in this sense, that it might well not work for you. For others, not you.

What to do? Try jabbering away at The Almighty. He’s listening, of course. You do so respectfully, needless to say. You calm down if possible, keeping in mind whom you are talking to, letting it sink in as much as possible, drinking it in.

The Our Father and Hail Mary come highly recommended, but we speak here of some sort of contact that allows some sort of assertion of the self that’s not written in black and white. You’re getting personal with The Creator, carefully, respectfully.

Oh that word again, that concept that doesn’t make a big claim on your psyche but neither does it violate protocol. It’s a common enough word that you can relate to without jumping whole hog into the prescribed and, let us say, the scary.

It has so many meanings or situations which are appropriate, a sort of sounding board, or stepping stone. Use it for that. Watch your step.

You come hands empty? Most of us do. Go back. Pick up your Bible. The gospels serve you well at this point, all about the God-Man, the Son, making his way as salesman for what the Father has to say.

Listen to Him. Picture Him at work, as in St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, 2nd week, as described here:

. . . . meditating on Jesus as itinerant preacher and miracle-worker. This was our introduction to the Ignatian imagination. We were put to picturing or contemplating Gospel events, as opposed to great and noble thoughts. In episode after episode, we imagined ourselves there with Jesus, almost without attention to the meaning of it for ourselves but rather to get familiar with him.

So. Take what you pictured and make it your own.

Read it in a good version, I mean translation and some explaining along the way. I recommend The Alba House Gospels, in the pages of which you find readable accounts that fit nicely in most pockets and/or purses. Among many others, of course.

Think it over. Take charge of the experience. Come to Jesus with it on your mind.

Sit or kneel with it on your mind. You’re in charge here. Relish the thought. Let the thinking flow. This is horse’s mouth stuff. React as the spirit moves you. Fifteen minutes wherever you find yourself.

In background is what? Rather, who?

The One who’s everywhere. Who else? You’ve done something about it. His world-wide presence, that is.

Devils taking the hindmost. Why the Michael the Archangel prayer? Rather, why not????

Mark 5:1-20

Jesus and his disciples came to the other side of the sea, to the territory of the Gerasenes. When he got out of the boat, at once a man from the tombs who had an unclean spirit met him.

Possessed, he was, with a dreadful history. He’d been living in a cemetery, bound often “with shackles and chains,” which he would rip off, “night and day . . . crying out and bruising himself.”

Spotting Jesus, who had been telling him, “Unclean spirit, come out!” running up and throwing himself in front of him, “do not torment me!”

Jesus asked him his name. “Legion is my name, their leader said. “There are many of us.” He begged not to being driven from the neighborhood, where presumably they had found a sort of resting place.

Jesus said OK and sent them to a herd of pigs, 2,000 of them according to Mark, “a great herd,” says Luke. via the Knox version.

Down a “steep bank” they went, into the sea, where they drowned, and off went the herdsmen to alert the neighborhood, stunned by the news. People flocked to the scene to see what happened.

When they got there, there was the former home of devils, sitting “clothed and in his right mind.”

They were “were seized with fear.” It didn’t help to be told by witnesses what had happened.

Panic-stricken, they begged Jesus to get lost.

He went. Boarding the boat on which he had come, he was begged by the now demon-free man to let him aboard so he could join his entourage.

Nope, Jesus said, sending him rather to his home and family to tell them what Jesus had done for him. Off he went to in the neighborhood, spreading the word.

And all, Mark tells us, “were amazed.”

Well, it is amazing, when you get down to it, less you might say, because Jesus routed these irredeemably wicked creatures, as the image it gives us of their presence in the world.

Why on earth would Vatican 2 have downplayed praying to their chief enemy Michael, contradicting the supreme pontiff of a mere 79 years previously who installed the prayer to him to be said after low masses.

Revisiting recent commentary about the mass as head trip and how its current version, concocted mere decades ago, has led us worshipers down a primrose path of I dunno what, but I do know it’s missing the meditation element, worshipers being drawn willy-nilly into a kind of busy involvement that pretty much rules out so private an exercise.

Not meditation as young Jesuits learned from Father Master in the Milford novitiate in the early 50s, dwelling the night before on “points” you planned to meditate on, keeping them in mind as you went off to slumber and calling them to mind when you woke up, ready to pray.

An hour on your kneeler in the six-man dormitory to 6:30, down to low mass in the “domestic” chapel, Latin of course, ending at 7, when you dug in for 15 minutes of thanksgiving followed by a march across the aisle to the breakfast table, all in silence of course, except on “feast days” and not many of those. Silent breakfasts were our habit/fate and solo departures, meaning there was no grace-after if always before.

Nothing like that for me and you, probably not for today’s Jesuit novices either, which doesn’t mean we can’t emulate that to a (much) lesser degree while attending our 1969 mass, during which we can pray a little, snatching moments between participatory responses and gestures, catching a whiff of something-out-there, something-in-there, Someone rather, He who is everywhere.

As a St. Catherine of Siena, Oak Park IL grade schooler in the early 40s, Some of us would toss off a “God-sees-you” taunt, big joke you know, at someone about to do something bad, probably referring to sexual maneuvers, signaling reaction to what we heard from the sisters, at one time meaning it (not so much) and mocking it. Callous youth you know, fooling around with words of rebellion while back-handedly, dare we say, respecting it, taking it seriously. Maybe not.

Thing is, we aged Catholics can take it very seriously. And realize it and keep it in mind, in good times and not so good and even if there be such, neither. There we are, being ourselves, walking down the street, giving a thought to, what? The four last things, of course, don’t we all? Heh.

So anyhow those early 50s learnings pop to the fore. One of Ignatius’ weeks, I speak of the 30-day Exercises weeks, specifically when it was all about one of the four things, death and dying, which had us imagining ourselves on our death bed, getting ready for the Big Day, wondering how we’d like to have lived. Keeping in mind, of course, the transient nature of our life, here today gone tomorrow, we know not day or hour, and the street-walker named above, while considering such naturally prefers some sort of distraction, which understandable as it is, does not do the trick.

Nor does feeling guilty about it in the first place or feeling scared or just indefinably just god-awful uncomfortable. So first thing is to calm down, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Rather, there’s a better start, just ask yourself where God is. He’s the Creator and we believe keeps everything going, without Him there would be nothing that is, without Him nothing would keep going. Where is He? Try everywhere, try yourself. It’s He in Whom we live and move and have our being, as Paul told his audience at the Areapogus, an Athens court, and while you’re at it, put in a word or two asking him to give you a hand in getting a handle on that. If anyone knows, he does.

Better yet, ask the Creator, who is in you and with you and knows all about you, what’s good and bad. He knows the odds against you and in your favor and is committed to help you beat them or capitalize on them and all in all manage to get through life. Just ask Him. Often. Every day. You owe it to yourself but mainly to Him.

As for meditation at mass, take the ball and run with it. Settle in, start. Come on, gates, let’s meditate.

So. There we were, minding our own business, and away we went on a tour of mass as head trip, first defining head trip and then expanding on the concept.

Now more expanding as promised . . .

Mass for most of us is a pay-attention time, do this, do that, stand up, sit down, even kneel down but not when you’re in line for communion, then DON’T, or so implies our archbishop, who is also a cardinal and close friend and ally of the reigning pontiff. his man in the USA, giving his considered opinion about it in a newspaper column, of which newspaper he’s publisher, for what that’s worth, and that’s a lot, believe me, and I should know because I used to work for one and when asked by a small magazine editor to whom I’d pitched a story, for whom was I writing? whom did I consider my audience? and I said the editors.

Wasn’t supposed to say that, he took that as a so-what-else-is-new matter and I forget what I told him after that, but it was the truth, editors decide, some more than others. Got chewed out once by a picky one, not sharpest knife in the drawer, for writing a column for the big paper as if my readers knew a lot of what I knew as ex-Jesuit and before that an altar boy who won the religion medal at graduation from Fenwick High School in Oak Park in 1949.

So. The aforementioned archbishop, also a cardinal and last but not least chief shepherd of souls in two highly populated northern Illinois counties, owns his newspaper and says in it what he pleases, which is only right. It happens all the time.

We can debate this of course, as dozens have done online, making quite a splash, about what he said about kneeling for communion — stand up and hold out yr hand, mister, look at me and say amen to what I say — not dropping to yr knees, sticking out yr tongue, to the dismay as he saw it of fellow worshipers and creating chaos where once there was orderly PROCESSING.

So? What now, my friends? Had enough of what’s gone bad with mass attendance, yes. So? Look to the ideal, lost in the decades of swinging with the sway, lost in the shuffle of alleged reform of worship which turned out not what was intended, rather something of a betrayal some say of all that was and could be to get you not figuring out via head work but paying attention and lifted out of yourself and into God knows what, in any case nothing touchy-feely but a serious catching hold of What’s Bigger Than You in the presence of Whom? The Creator, my friend via the language of love, Latin, which becomes for you, mysterious as it is to 99% of you, an evocation of MYSTERY. Yes.

Nothing you can figure out, you can’t, you know, because it’s bigger than you by far and what you know so far. Got to watch oneself here, don’t get cute. It’s a danger, and this writer has no one in mind but himself when he makes the warning. Thing is, you want a liturgy that opens for you something really big, that leads you on gently enough, edging aside the busy-busy, letting, we make boldly to say, the Spirit move you.

Let’s stop there for now, take a breath while considering what’s to be done about our sit-down, stand-up, kneel-down-but-be-careful-when-and-where problems.

God bless Us, Every One! as Tiny Tim said to a chorus of amens from here to eternity.

Later . . .

When mass became a group exercise, the worshiper became a team member, taking his or her cues from the signal-caller standing up front behind the table altar.

Team members had to stay alert. Absorption was a temptation, harmful to the team. The quarterback says hep and everyone moves. Pay attention, everyone.

Head trip? It’s from the 60s, when drugs were on more minds than today. Less talked about anyway. Look it up.

. . . an exhilarating intellectual experience . . . a mentally exhilarating or productive experience, one in which a person’s intellect or imagination seems to expand . . .

Used how? Samples:

It is the sort of head trip that leaves audiences gasping for air and critics lunging for adjectives.

What a weird and wonderful head trip, something less watched than experienced.

And it’s just a total head trip.

This head-trip heist flick is tight, tricksy and entrancing.

Floating face down, we embark on elaborate head trips to distract ourselves from our bodies’ increasingly urgent reminders to breathe.

Ah, that last one. Beautiful. Take note: elaborate, distract ourselves.

Mind conquers all. Think. I must add the subway memorandum of the 60s, THIMK!, in half-mockery of, half urging people at a time when public-service announcements were the rage or at least having a brief turn on readers’ consciousness.

Elaborate. Remember this, remember that. Look it up. Page, number, program of the day. Come on. Stay abreast. Get real, or pandemonium’s like to walk upon the scene. To illustrate, Jonas and the whale, Noah and the ark.

Read the prayer, say the response, stand up, sit down, kneel. Do this, do that, and THIMK! Don’t miss the intellectuality of it all. Stay alert, Jonas and the whale, Noah and the ark.

Wave your hand(s). Everyone to everyone. Be a phrase-maker, no, a haze-maker. Let the air ring. Then stop. That’s enough. Pull yourself together. Get ready for the next moment. Think. You can do it if you try.

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