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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.

more more more more . . . .

. . . yes, the evil one, as the man from Tarsus makes much of while calling for prayers from his flock.

Brothers and sisters: Draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the Devil.

Yes . . .

For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens.

We should (calmly) think on that. It’s us against the second-most-powerful person in creation, lurking everywhere to catch us and do us in.

“Put on the armor of God,” the apostle writes, “that you may . . . resist on the evil day and . . . hold your ground.”

Suit up. Trouble ahead.

. . . stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the Gospel of peace.

In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the Evil One.

Catch the rest of it here. Meanwhile. keep in mind two things: There is an evil force in the universe and there is a shield to deal with his flaming arrows.

I had an exchange aeons ago about this devil business, actually on his counterparts, angels — the St. Michaels of the universe — with a young man who dropped in on the rectory where I lived in an Iowa town during my ordination summer, 1963. How we got around to it, I don’t recall, but I do recall his being surprised that I believed in angels.

Sure, I said. Actually, I took them for granted, ever since I prayed “Angel of God, my guardian dear,
to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide” — one of the first prayers I learned eighty-some years ago.

I wasn’t shocked to hear the young man’s reaction, but recalling it reminds me of the loss or weakening of such an article of faith among us, where Satan is a comic punch line or even where it’s become a scary thing we’d rather not talk about.

Heck with all that, point is what we do about this devil-take-the-hindmost business. We need no prompting, I think, that believers as we are, we buy into the existence of this malevolent creature, the classic case of bigger they are, the harder they fall — Corruptio optimi pessima in the super mother tongue —  Satan and his fellow damned-forever villainous co-conspirators cum saboteurs.

Read the day’s newspapers and see, something’s radically wrong about the world. By accident? Thinking people, including believers, know better than that, do we not? No, not by accident but by villainous creatures, against whom we dreadfully need divine help.

WHICH IS EVER AT HAND!

End of rant. Now go and do what Paul says. Please.

No mass today. Someone didn’t show up and know what? I did not miss it. Had been meditating 15 minutes up to the announcement, to good effect I might add, what I could not have done once the yelling and moving about started, the back and forth, up and down of the Mass of Now.

You can use The Psalms, New Catholic version, St. Joseph edition (Catholic Book Publishing, 2004). If that be a sales pitch, so be it.

Tell you how I use it. Say the presider of the day is off his game. Not up to his usual top-notch clarity of sound, correctness of pronunciation, accuracy of emphasis, all-’round perspicacity, has become something of a distraction. Not coming through in the way we like, not cutting the mustard from the stage, I mean altar table, from which he presides.

Suppose all of it. What to do? Worshiper wants to stay abreast, does he not? He has delivered the body and wants the whole experience, more important — much more — he owes his full attention as far as possible to what’s happening and does not want to wake up after five or ten minutes of God knows what, having to pull himself together.

No. What he wants, what he needs, is a counter-distraction, which is where Psalms come in. This book is not the only counter-distraction device — prime among others being the Rosary, of course — but it’s a very good vehicle for holy thinking to accompany, not to blot out, the super-holy activity of the moment.

It can be done. You take in the one without blotting out the other and away you go. Try it, you’ll like it.

Case in point

Consider beginning at the start of the God-blessed book. I have done so, to good effect.

The first Psalm, short and to the point, asks what kind of man is blessed and answers, one who “does not guide his steps by ill counsel, or turn aside where sinners walk, or, where scornful souls gather.”

Stay away from know-it-all wiseguys.

Instead be truly wise, one “whose heart is set day and night on the law of the Lord.”

Keep God in mind.

This good guy “stands firm as a tree planted by running water, ready to yield its fruit when the season comes, not a leaf faded; all that he does will prosper.”

Let’s hear it, fellows and gals.

Their counterpart? “the wicked,” who “like chaff the wind sweeps away.”

Fly-by-nights . . .

. . . who “when judgement comes, to rise and plead their cause . . . will have no [role] in the reunion of the just.”

The just, en contraire, “walk . . . under the Lord’s protection.”

The wicked? They are “soon lost to sight!”

It’s the psalmist’s world, carrying a heap of — God bless us all — rock-bottom, heart-of-the-matter doctrine.

See this book of poetry as 150 stirring units — poems or chapters if you please — with a philosophy and more than that, a series of instructions on how to live.

Unparallelled in the Judaeo-Christian heritage.

Now, for unadulterated reading, here’s this first Psalm in its Knox translation.

1 Blessed is the man who does not guide his steps by ill counsel, or turn aside where sinners walk, or, where scornful souls gather, sit down to rest;

2 the man whose heart is set on the law of the Lord, on that law, day and night, his thoughts still dwell.

3 He stands firm as a tree planted by running water, ready to yield its fruit when the season comes, not a leaf faded; all that he does will prosper.

4 Not such, not such the wicked; the wicked are like chaff the wind sweeps away.

5 Not for the wicked, when judgement comes, to rise up and plead their cause; sinners will have no part in the reunion of the just.

6 They walk, the just, under the Lord’s protection; the path of the wicked, how soon is it lost to sight!

I love the rhythm of it, the richness of its figures. 150 of them, as it happens, such a gift from our Judaeo-Christian tradition.