The Pared Down Mass is Better

Attending Mass in recent weeks is – and will be in weeks to come – a strange experience. Every other pew is roped off. Everyone is wearing a mask. Singing is gone. Touching and shaking hands at the Sign of Peace is gone. Greeting the priest after the Mass is gone. Altar servers are gone. For some unknown reason, the bells sounding at the moment of consecration have been abandoned. At communion time, the priest is masked-up and the communicant approaches on floor markers with taped X’s in six-foot intervals. The floor is covered with the same type of sticky plastic wrap that house movers use. Walking over it squeaks like sneakers on a gym floor.

The impulse to twist one’s foot and really get off a good, wrenching squeak just for the fun of it is a new distraction to the piety of the occasion. The communicant receives the host, while masked. He or she has to step away, remove their mask, and while not tripping, consume the host, replace their mask, and then continue down the central aisle to return to their pew. At dismissal, the ushers begin at the back of the church and guide people out pew by pew.

A Cold Experience

At first, this arrangement appeared surreal like something out of a science fiction novel. The encounter seems strikingly cold, mechanical, and plasticized. However, I have come to appreciate it. I was so accustomed to the routine Mass that it took some time before I was able to ascertain the increased beauty in the bareness, like a diamond in the rough. There is a pleasant humility in the lack of ceremonial flair that I am used to.

I must overcome hurdles now to participate in the Mass. The entire liturgy, at present, is performed and attended under imposed restrictions but its core remains pure and full. (High masses with choirs and decorations, incense and other adornments are heavenly and beautiful too but they are not available at the moment.) The Mass goes on at this time in a minimalist fashion.

Mass During War

The current circumstance brings to mind the poverty of a Mass being said, with the hood a military jeep serving as an altar, next to a field in a faraway place in the midst of the Korean War. That is the photographic image which comes to mind when I attend Mass today. It’s the one of the Army chaplain, Father Emil Kapaun saying Mass while a solider kneels in the dirt next to what looks like a cornfield. (Scenes from the 1963 classic movie, Lilies of the Field visualized a similar scenario of a traveling priest to the poor who said Mass from the tailgate of an old station wagon.) Knowing that Kapaun heroically saved soldiers’ lives and died in a POW camp renders the photo more awe-inspiring. He and soldiers remained devout in spite of being in a war where life was lived on the edge possible death. Even war could not impair the practice of faith.

Saint Maximillian Kolbe

There is another setting I see in my mind when I attend Mass now with all the precautions against the adversary of coronavirus. There were no photographic mementos taken in Auschwitz. The story has nevertheless come down to us. Before he volunteered his life so that another man with a family could survive, Saint Maximillian Kolbe heard men’s confessions secretly in the bunks of the death camp’s grimy dormitories. He ministered to other condemned prisoners from his cell until he was the only one left alive. He had a strong devotion to the Blessed Mother. His actions exhibited the same quality as the Virgin Mary’s appearance in a French a grotto with roses adorning her feet. The site was used as a trash dump, for pasturing animals and collecting firewood, yet heaven touched that place.

Beauty

Other forms of art illustrate a similar kind of intensified beauty in beleaguered human situations. Michelangelo’s sculpture, The Pieta, for instance, I think of as being weepingly beautiful. It incorporates the whole story of the incarnation and the epic sadness of a human mother holding the dead child to whom she gave birth. A short story by J.D. Salinger, For Esme with Love and Squalor piercingly encapsulates an enduring human link between a WWII soldier and a young girl, whom he met at a tea room before he went to war and experienced the devastation of combat. The story depicts a thin, yet powerful connection between people but its sentiment is like the sweet calm of Catholics uniting at Mass with each other and with God. Beloved author Frank McCourt achieved a related duality of emotion in his tragicomic memoir, Angela’s Ashes.

There is something about being in the midst of rubble, experiencing the worst stresses and disasters of our lives that makes the faith most unadulterated and strong. One could say this is a lighter version of how Mother Theresa viewed working in the slums of Calcutta. She said it was easy to see the face of Jesus in the poor and dying. My greater appreciation of the Mass in the present, clinical protective landscape is not dramatic. It a quiet, interior understanding. It is also outwardly. The world sees a degree of normalcy in observing that people continue to go to Mass regardless of the imposed limitations.

Less is More

These are the thoughts and images that float in and out of my mind these days when I go to church in its current status of forced simplicity. It is because much of the celebratory art has been stripped away that I believe makes the essence of the Mass more discernable than before. It is similar to a concept often uttered in writers’ craft circles: less is more. Putting in too many descriptors, scenes, excessive dialogue to elaborate on some important point actually ends up weakening the work and detracting from the whole. Fewer frills at Mass means more. It is more of the heart of the matter, which, under current circumstances is appropriate, and even, better.