How the New Mass Beats a River into Submission

In the 2016 movie Dr. Strange, the Ancient One, Strange's mentor in "the mystical arts", told him, "You cannot beat a river into submission; you have to surrender to its current, and use its power as your own."

It has dawned on me that the Novus Ordo Mass does, indeed, ceaselessly try to "beat a river into submission", the River of Prayer that is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

This is closely related to the revelation I received after I began to attend High Masses, but which first suggested itself to me when I first had begun to attend Eastern liturgies in Churches in Communion with Rome. The revelation took a while to bud and flower. Partly that's because the Eastern liturgies were so "exotic" in comparison to what I was used to. They were so culturally "alien" to me, who, though about ten-years-old in 1968, never really could remember attending a TLM as a child.

When I then received the blessing of being able to attend a TLM (in an old, un"Modernized" re: not "Wreckovated" church), the full force of the essential difference between the TLM and the NO Masses bore upon me: but even then, I struggled for the words to describe it. The way I phrased it then was, "The TLM gives you more spiritual elbow-room." One noticed that in the Eastern liturgies, or at least I did, that what with various things going on, and the choir continuously producing sacred song, that the congregation wasn't forced into rote responses everyone had to make in lock-step; instead, one could let one's mind wander, as it were, and really of course – in the holy context of Christ's Calvary Sacrifice being re-enacted, with the veil between Heaven and Earth being parted – the Spirit was present, and He it was who led your spirit into all sorts of contemplations.

Thanks to the old pagan Ancient One, though, now I get it. The Novus Ordo Mass beats the River of Sacred Liturgical Prayer into submission. It breaks up not only your train of thought but your prayer. In fact, it renders your prayer impossible. The Holy Spirit can't speak to you nor you to Him because you're too busy watching the orchestra conductor, the officiating priest, waiting for the "next thing to happen", producing your responses when required – and everyone doing so all together, like soldiers on a parade ground practicing drill.

It's not that one doesn't pray at all at the N.O. Mass, no; one does pray, but one prays the group prayers, in unison, supposedly with gusto, i.e., as Protestants do – or as certain ignorant, highly educated Catholic "liturgical experts" thought Protestants did. It reminds me of Ward Bond, the priest in John Ford's The Quiet Man, crying out, "Let's cheer like Protestants!"

My wife, a melancholy, introverted type, quiet, unassuming, does really NOT like any sort of boisterous, extrovert sort of "get-together" and she definitely cannot stand the NO Mass, which of course stresses an extroverted boisterousness as its esprit de corps. The notorious handshake "kiss of peace" fiasco, in the middle of the most sacred segment of the liturgy, is only the most notorious example of this. The whole of the horizontal, congregation-focused-on-the-priest's-facial-expressions N.O. Mass is one long flailing against the River of Sacred Prayer.

So with that insight, we can see a simple, basic reason tens of millions of Catholics left that Mass. They couldn't pray it; they couldn't contemplate anything – whether Spirit-led or self-led. For a Me Decade birthed liturgy, created by old codger bureaucrats who had grown up listening to endless chatty radio – no silences there! – it is amazing how "un-Me" the N.O. Mass is! YOU, the individual, never get a chance to "surrender" to the current of liturgical prayer that floods down through the TLM from Mt. Calvary; YOU never get a chance to "use its power as your own." Instead of that, you're a cog in a machine, or more like a performer, actually, in a liturgical engine chugging away boisterously, a machine whose engineer constantly is in eye-contact with your reflections, as it were: your conscious distracted, and duty-bound to pay ceaseless attention, dropping any and all trains of thought at your conductor's steam-whistling summons.

And of course bellowing out (with gusto) some pretty hackneyed (at best) music.

The Novus Ordo tries to beat our liturgical prayer – two thousand years of it now – into submission, and the result it has beaten many of us into submission, into the miserable condition of our current state of mainstream Church worship: unsolitary in its boisterous regimentation, spiritually poor, rather nastily so, certainly too often brutish, and never short enough, (if I maybe mutilate Thomas Hobbes' famous line).

An Préachán