Whatever Works

Recently, I became aware of a piece written by Anthony Esolen in July on the decay of the Roman Catholic mass as it succumbs to pragmatism. Note his melancholy derived from questionable expressions of worship.

Here I am three and four times cursed.

I have read and taught poetry all my adult life. This is one curse. I know English grammar. That is a second curse. My family and I are versed in the long tradition of Christian hymnody; we collect hymnals from all traditions, and we have sung one or two thousand of them, sometimes in languages other than English. This is a third and most terrible curse. And we know our Scripture. Cursed a fourth time, cursed and damned to writhe in eternal pain. Well, not eternal. The pain is transient but real—pain mingled with frustration and disappointment, that well-meaning people should give their talents and energies to stuff that is so worthless, and sometimes worse than worthless. For sometimes it is flat-out heresy.

While I am not Roman Catholic, I do feel his pain. Reverence is too often exchanged for pragmatism, depth for delicacies. Better to be taking the sage advice of Pastor Larry Peters:

We need to pay attention to Scripture. Saying back to God what He has said to us is the most sure and certain thing we can say and do in worship. I think I read that somewhere. We need to pay attention to history. Every age and generation is not given a blank slate to create worship but they are heirs of an astonishingly rich tradition. We need to pay attention to creed and confession. What we do on Sunday morning must be more than consistent with what we say we believe—it must be an accurate reflection of what we say we believe—prayed dogma! We need to pay attention to what is new not as determinative but as a contribution to a catholic past and a catholic future. Not everything new is evil but we must carefully discern what is good, right, true, beautiful, faithful, and worthy from our own age and generation. We need to pay attention to language. Words flow in and out of our vocabularies and they change in meaning but this must be held in tension with the vocabulary of Scripture and tradition and words that mean what God says they mean. We need to pay attention to excellence.