Thursday, August 31, 2006
(3:50 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Worship: Styles
Today I had an orientation event for the PhD students serving as TAs in MDiv required classes and receiving partial funding through a grant-based program at the seminary called the Center for Community Transformation. Part of it was having one of the faculty members who is teaching in that program tell us about his course in liturgy. Also, I am involved -- although I feel bad about my slackerhood in this regard -- in planning a chapel service for the PhD Student Association, which I apparently "lead" now.This has led me to think about my liturgical preferences. Simply put, I prefer the Catholic "low mass," the stripped-down version of the liturgy that is normally celebrated on weekdays. The church I attended in Oxford also did something like a low mass for most of its Sunday services -- they had one mass a week that was total liturgical overload, sung Latin mass with choir and incense and three priests and seventeen altar servers, but everything else was basically one priest and one altar server, occasionally supplemented by additional priests who would come out of nowhere and help distribute communion.
Partly, this preference is emotional. Music was such a key part of the emotional manipulation in church while I was growing up that I find it to be a pleasant relief when there is no music at all -- even though the music in Catholic churches is normally of a very different style. Also, even though I have obviously been to many "low masses" that were the primary Sunday masses, the association is more closely linked to daily mass. I prefer the daily masses because of the smaller crowds -- if you're lucky, you can avoid the smarmy hand-shaking altogether. Somehow the uncrowded church and the matter-of-fact approach add to a certain objectivity of the proceedings, a sense that I personally don't matter and can come and go. That's how I feel about the regular Sunday services as well, but in the daily mass, it feels somehow more okay -- I feel out of place either way, but for the daily mass, the out-of-place-ness is more constitutive of the experience. The very fact that I'm there is gratuitous, more than enough.
Nothing makes me feel lonelier than going to church on Sunday morning, in any denomination. Not eating Burger King while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on a Friday night, nothing. The daily mass gives me space to be alone -- which I actually am, most of the time, and which I actually want and need to be. "So what you're saying," asks the evangelical superego, "is that you want a worship experience that doesn't make demands on you?" Well, no -- I don't want a worship experience at all. Or maybe I do. I want to stand-sit-kneel every so often, I want to say the words the congregation is supposed to say, I want to sit patiently through the bad homily, I want to taste the wafer and maybe the watered-down wine -- I want to make sure I don't forget. It's nice to be reminded, every so often, that this stupid and pointless thing is happening, and to participate in it, to waste a half hour on it and walk away with nothing. I think that's important.
