Wednesday, May 04, 2005
(11:34 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Liturgical Blues
Recently, I've been occasionally saying the Daily Office and even a rosary here and there. I don't know why, other than the fact that it gives me something to do and that praying gives me a chance to figure out what is really important to me -- what's worth asking "God" about, if such a person (or persons) should turn out to have existed.This is partly a function of the weather. When I first was in the process of converting to Catholicism, the Lent/Easter season was when I really developed my piety by committing to walk home from school every day during Lent and saying various prayers on the way. This pattern has repeated itself every spring since. Together with my intense desire to befriend and get to know every woman my own age I happen to run into (the girl who works at the library, to whom I've said hello a million times over the course of this semester without ever introducing myself; the girl at the bank yesterday, etc.), I also want to go to church and pray more.
Obviously there is some conflict between these two desires, given that one of the conditions for ceremonial cleanness in the Roman Catholic Church is not having had any voluntary sexual discharge since one's last confession (outside of marital sex without a condom or other birth-control method), but that is one of many regulations on which the average priest has instituted a don't-ask-don't-tell policy, for a variety of very good reasons. I actually adhered closely to that policy while I was at Oxford, attending The Oratory, with the result that I bitched at my housemates about the dishes a lot. When I got back to Bourbonnais, I started pulling in tail like you would not believe, and confessing that often was clearly impractical, so I basically asked a priest, "Could I stop worrying about this?" and he said, "You have to sin to be forgiven." He was a good Jungian priest who hoped, among other things, that the feminine principle would be allowed to range free through the church and held a variety of other heterodox opinions for which I'm sure Benedict XVI would discipline him harshly if he ever caught wind of it.
That style of priesthood, reminiscent more of the rabbis who try to maintain some continuity and identity while also admitting that sometimes reality happens, seems likely to largely die out within the next 20 years or so, as the nice Vatican II priests all die off and the psycho conservative asshole priests take their place. I'm not saying that none of the generation of priests currently ascendant in the church are psycho conservative asshole priests -- I've run into several who certainly mixed and matched "psycho," "conservative," and "asshole" to varying degrees -- just that there's a certain hegemony of priests who happen to be the kind of people that normal people like and trust. That problem is, however, in the process of being fixed, through various corrections in the seminary curricula and simple generational shift.
I don't want to go to a mass celebrated by a psycho conservative asshole priest. I just don't. I know that at bottom, as long as the guy has been ordained and is capable of reading "this is my body, this is my blood" out of a book, a priest is a priest -- but there are priests who make ceremonially unclean people like Adam Kotsko feel welcome, and there are priests who make ceremonially unclean people feel like they'd be turned away if they sat down and talked with the priest for a few minutes. There are priests who make ceremonially unclean people who, like me, might want to go to confession just for the sake of asking, "So are we cool?" (not out of any vestigial guilt, but out of a desire to continue to participate, as I really am rather than under false pretenses, in this liturgical life to which I've grafted myself) feel like they'd probably be refused absolution. Just for example, the pastor of the cathedral parish at Holy Name, in downtown Chicago, would be one of the kinds of priests I've described.
I don't want to be rude! I don't want to hang out in a church where I'm unwelcome! It's uncomfortable for everyone involved. And it's not like I'm saying that psycho conservative assholes shouldn't be allowed to participate in that liturgical life if they wish to. I just kind of wish that the psycho conservative asshole contingent -- the kind that exists in every church body to the right of the Unitarians -- didn't have hegemony to such a high degree that they seem poised to purge the normal person contingent. That kind of pisses me off. I'd really like to go to mass, and I'd really like it to be according to the Roman missal -- but I've been reading a lot of stuff in the news that makes me feel like it's going to be increasingly difficult for me to find a church that runs those kinds of services that is going to let ceremonially unclean folk continue to participate.
